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ukhackster writes "Traditional magnetic hard drive platters could be on the way out, thanks to SanDisk's launch today of a hard drive based on flash memory chips. The device can store 32GB of data and is meant for notebooks . SanDisk claims that using flash chips means faster access and better reliability, so less danger of a serious system crash wiping out all your valuable data if you drop your laptop. The downside, though, is price. At an extra $600 dollars, are price-conscious consumers going to be interested?"

Hrmmmm..... just in time for Macworld? Oh please, oh please, oh please.....

I've written about this before in a number of places, but most recently here [utah.edu] on my last trip to Argentina, but I am hoping that we will see a revised 12in Powerbook nee MacBook Pro (or smaller) in the next Macworld because I really do miss the smaller form factor. It would be tremendously useful for travelers and photographers as well as giving us better battery life.

I am currently using a 15in Powerbook that I traded up from when the 12in Powerbook was cancelled, but a smaller footprint would help tremendously with travel. With the 15in Powerbook/Macbook Pro, I love the illuminated keyboard and the performance, but would be willing to pay a premium to carry a smaller laptop, subnotebook or tablet running OS X. It does not even have to have an optical drive as I rip movies I purchase or rent to the hard drive for long airline flights and in fact, if we could get flash drives down a bit in price (or get a sweet deal on bulk purchases for the manufacturer), it would be possible to even get rid of the hard drive provided we could still pack 30-40 GBs of storage space in the device. Battery life would be improved and if you combine it with a 10in diagonal new technology LED display (or OLED), we may even be able to get away with seven or eight hours of honest full on battery life. So Steve, come on dude. We've talked about this before several times. The technology currently exists or is damn close and I am sure there is a market for such a device, so please, please, please.

Yup, people eager to line up to pay over the odds for flashy underpowered trinkets are the ideal market for the initial release of this technology.

Ha ha ha. Seriously though, the ideal market for this technology has been defense related work for a number of years now. However, costs are decreasing to a point where we can now start putting these drives in Toughbooks (to make 'em even tougher), or portable devices that do tend to get bumped and thrown around a fair bit more. Just witness my last passage through customs here in the US where a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down. If there were flash discs instead of hard drives, I would have been perhaps less pissed off.

The other category where flash drives are absolutely critical is for lots of remotely control data gathering devices. One of my friends who has been working on remotely piloted vehicles has been clamoring for just this sort of technology as it is much more rugged than hard drives for their applications (hard landings).

" a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down."

It helps if you heed the prominently displayed signs and take your laptop out of the bag as instructed before you present it for inspection.

It helps if you heed the prominently displayed signs and take your laptop out of the bag as instructed before you present it for inspection.

Not if you are rushed off of the plane to care for another passenger (turns out was VIP and foreign national) who is having a medical emergency. We did not even get to the gate where you are officially supposed to present your materials, yet you are still told that you have to endure an inspection of belongings and documentation even when trying to obtain medical care

The question of whether people will be willing to pay an "extra $600" for this technology isn't really an issue.

A little over a year ago, 1gigabyte flash drives were selling for over $100. If you go to Staples right now, you can still see some. But I bought a 1gig Sansadisk flash for $15 a few weeks ago. So a better question would be if people would be willing to pay an additional $80 for this new technology because that's what it'll cost a year or so from now.

The link you posted shows huge performance losses for fragmented data.From the link:

If like me you thought that flash memory wouldn't be affected by fragmentation, then you'll find these results quite an eye opener. Looking at the write performance, you can see that while there is no difference in performance between the card states for 512B files (as you'd expect, since they'll fit in a single block, and therefore won't ever be fragmented), for 32kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to half the performance of the defragmented and blank cards. By the time you hit 256kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to almost one quarter the performance of the defragged card, and one eighth the performance of the blank card! The relative performance seems to be maintained at the same level for 2MB files as for 256kB files. With read performance, the difference doesn't get huge until the 2MB range, but then we see a massive drop in performance.

Honestly, I thought that there wouldn't be a significant performance loss. Apparently, there is. My guess is that this is less of an issue as the on-board flash controller gets quicker, as well as if the drive interface to the flash is quick, but it's definitely data for consideration.

Data fragmentation isn't an issue with flash memory--they don't need to spin up to the point where the data is located, they can simply access it right away. However, the limited number of erase cycles can be a problem. It all depends on how the file system/you are going to use the drive. If you're going to be moving data, replacing data, etc. often and don't need the benefits of speed and durability then this isn't for you yet. However, if you're primary concerns are durability (as mentioned in the posts a

But price-conscious consumers won't be the initial market; it will be security conscious businesses that don't want to risk losing valuable data worth much than $600. They will buy enough of them for the price to move down the demand curve, and into the consumer market. Look for them to be standard issue in 3-5 years.

Ok. How about for field engineers who are already hard on equipment? I'd bet that the hard drive is one of the more common failure of Toughbooks. Take that out of the equation, and you can keep your guys in the field working longer, without the downtime of repairs. Backups are good, but they don't solve every problem.

You must be an IT guy, someone who has never left the idealistic world of a desk and worked in the field (no I'm not talking about the server room). $600 verses backups is simple math when you're in the field. Also, say I'm on a processing platform in the middle of the Thai Gulf and my laptop has been collecting data for >5 hours using a program that can't be interrupted then the harddrive bombs...where's my backup? There's only so much redundancy that can be planned for and implemented with any logistic

By definition, a person who is "price conscious" will most likely not spring for the +$600 pricetag. The cost/GB is way too high.
I see it being introduced just as any other technology - early adopters will get half-baked, Rev. A quality devices and pay a large premium for them. Once adoption becomes more widespread, prices will come down, and the "price conscious" (read: patient) folk will reap the benefits of the early adopters' beta testing.

Not really, because the real cost of these drives is the cost of flash, which has already seen the benefits of economy scale so it's not going to get much cheaper. I mean, a 32GB flash drive is going to get cheaper, but it will be due to Moore's law, not economy of scale, so a flash drive will never be competitive to a traditional hard drive (except in applications they're already competitive in now).

I had no end of problems with CF cards while doing some embedded systems work. Surprisingly, the limited write cycle was the least of the problems; mostly the cards tended to die due to improper powerup/power down where, presumably, transient currents would somehow fry the card. It happened to several brands and I never understood why they didn't have integrated protections from this sort of thing. A second, more sinister type of failure was due to mechanical shock; it seems the wires within the chips (those gold ones connecting the silicon to the pins) would break. Found this out the hard way after moving a chip to a working card. (soldering was most likely not the cause, since the card started working again with the original chip put back into place).

My laptop hard drive can handle 30MB/s linear writes. In real-world usage, however, head movements mean that I am very, very unlikely to get more than 5-10MB. Don't underestimate the improvement that no-cost seeking could bring.

Frankly, hard drives fail so rarely that it's not really a problem in my opinion. I really don't think flash "drive" is as fast as a hard drive of the same price, there's really no point. The problem with flash is that for each bit, you have to architect tiny wires, with a drive, it's just a two-state point in a magnetic medium, for the near term, cost effectiveness, speed and density of hard drives simply win out. If you are so worried about reliability, for $500 you can RAID-mirror two 200GB drives in

Such a system is obviously not aimed at those for whom price is the main consideration. For those interested in performance, however, an extra $600 may well be worth it. I paid more than that to upgrade my laptop screen to a very high resolution, because it was worth it to me. I could definitely see myself paying an extra $600 for a system with this, though it would also need to have an actual, larger capacity harddrive, too, for my data.

Since flash is so great for laptop HDs, why not get a small flash memory card to serve as the HD instead of that whole shebang? For example, why not mount the root and user partition on a small 2GB flash card, which in eBay goes for less than 40$, and then mount the/home partition on a regular HD? Possibly I'm missing something important here but as far as I see it, 40$ are a whole lot less than 500$.

16*40 = $640, more than the $500 32 gig hard drive that is proposed. So your solution is more expensive, per megabyte, on the flash partition. This has been done before (see: the iOpener computer). The reason why a true road warrior would not want to do this is because you are generally using flash in (1) low power and (2) high vibration environments where you don't want a hard drive, period.

A similar concept is on the way: drives with a few gigs of non-volatile flash on top of their usual magnetic medium. But there is a downside: while using flash for a write cache or boot cache or whatever else means lots of good things, it also means most of your data is still on spinning discs. Drop that thing once or twice and the only thing left might be that 2G. This drive will probably find first use in rugged devices, where they've already been looking for various methods of getting laptops that can su

Flash filesystems avoid writes to reduce wear on the flash, so there should be more dirty data in memory at shutdown time, not less. And since writing to flash is slower than writing to disk, hibernate should take longer.

Yes, but why bother flushing anything to disk? If the write cache is permenent and the logic is stored on the controller not PC software, I contend that while you should definately worry about what happens at shutdown, it may not be necessary to wait. This logc stands for supend to RAM, however I do stand corrected on suspend to disk (hibernate).

If we're talking the security of your data, and if we are also talking about having both a built in flash drive and a standard spinning hard drive, then I'd rather put the OS on the spinner and put my valuable data on the flasher. The OS is easy to restore. The OS is generally unchanging from when you first set it up, and if you require a highly customized OS setup, you can always take a once time backup image once you get it just the way you want it. You're valuable data, on the other hand, isn't so eas

Even if it were cost feasible your drive would die in a matter of months or years because flash, especially cheap flash has a limited number of write and read cycles, very small actually, 1000-10000 on some. If windows is churning at your swap file it would only take a day or so to do that many writes. Also the bandwidth of normal cheap flash drives is pretty crappy. The SSDs have special write algorithms in them which spread the writes out around the disk evenly, this extends the life of the memory gate

I picked up a 4GB CF card a while back to do backups on (both a 20GB and 30GB HD started erroring out in my pen slate due to excess heat, so I'm back to the original 4GB HD) and intend to try this out as well.

Downside is that apparently having swap space on the card will exceed its read / write cycle capacity fairly quickly (anyone know what the symptoms of that are? Or if there's a way t

My Linux systems have a 4GB CF card that stores all static files such as programs, libraries, and config files. I have the partition with these files (yes it's/) made read-only and noatime. You really only want to use it for these files because flash media has a limited number of writes it can handle.It does speed the system up though and it makes it a lot less likely to suffer an unbootable situation which is really the reason I switched to flash. I got sick of needing to rebuild or restore my whole syste

That what I am thinking. If not use the drive outright to boot the OS, then notebook manufacturers should use it as a built-in backup device. Instead of relying on a backup CD, just use the flash drive and a special utililty to restore the system and crucial data.

Any modern CPU is fast enough for me these days, and I don't need a real big screen on a laptop. What I want is good, solid construction, and long battery life. How much of a laptop's power use is due to the hard drive? And how much of that is saved by using a flash-based disk?

Speaking of which, can someone show me how power consumption is divided among the parts of a laptop (CPU, chipset, wireless, drives, graphics card if applicable, LCD, backlight, etc)?

The power distribution in a modern notebook is EXTREMELY dependent on usage and the special model you look at.

Averaged, the biggest power-draw of a modern notebook is the display, followed by the cpu. (this may of course vary if the notebook has a very small display. With equal brightness, power-draw of course increases with display size, until it dominates everything else with those 17" 200cm/m^2 display). After that is chipset and GPU (of course depending on with model you use).

2.5" HDs are actually not very power-hungry. Typical power-draw figures are 5W during spinup, and about 2W while in use (dropping to 0.5W or so during spindown).

The FLASH drive mentioned draws about 0.6W in use, so in average you might gain 1.5W thats about 3-5% of the average power-draw of a modern notebook, and should give you about 10-15 minutes or so more.

Where's cringley's metal film disks? He said they were going to be in produciton soon and would cost less, use less power and have lower latency to flash even when spun down. They also work at elevated temperatures (suited for cars and embeddeds) and are insanley shock resistant. They could even be spun up to 30,000 rpms making them have higher data rates and lower latency. And they were lower profile than conventional disks. They sound a lot better than these flash compromises since there's no compromise. It's just an ultra-low power hard disk.

Please forget them. They are shit, will never work, and every argument he made in his blog-post was unscientific bullshit aimed into collecting disposable venture capital.

If the product will ever be released (i dont think so), it will be at a point of time when the stated specs (if reached at all) will be laughably outdated. And even then its much likely to be another click-of-death fiasco, because the whole technology is DOA.

Can you stop calling them "flash hard drives"? They are precisely not hard drives, but flash drives. It is like saying "liquid crystal cathode ray tube" or "electric internal combustion engine".

What's wrong with flash hard drives? They're flash, they're hard (I've yet to see a flash drive that was spongy), and they're drives. This is nothing like your other two examples because this one is still accurate. Now, if they'd called them "flash hard disks" or "flash magnetic disk" or something ridiculous you'd have a point. As it is, flash hard drive is both accurate and useful since by using the same terminology as current hard drives makes it easier for the average user to get their head around it's purpose.

Actually, shouldn't it be something like "Flash RAM"? A drive refers to a moving part, while the storage is, well, random access memory. I know it would confuse the hell out of the poor bastards who buy computers at Wal-Mart (PIII with 50 GB of RAM!!! Only 99.99!!!), but it seems to me that that would be the most accurate name...

Modern NAND flash is in fact not much more of a random access storage device than a hard drive. This is different from NOR flash, which is typically directly addressable like RAM (and much more expensive than NAND flash). These devices can only be accessed as block devices at the chip level. You certainly can't write to just one address, you need to erase the block and then serially feed in all the bytes to it. To read, you can address individual blocks and read their entire content. Further complicati

I can't imagine my laptop being the only source of my "valuable data". Admittedly, it's a bit of work, but I'm constantly synchronizing files back and forth between desktop and laptop. So I did a quick Google search to see how many cases of laptops containing valuable data there were. This article [reseller.co.nz] has some fun anecdotes about dropping laptops.

Seriously, though, there's some kind of marketing idea that dropping laptops is a huge problem. Apple's solution [apple.com] was one of the biggest gimmicks I've ever heard of.

At the university here I've already seen several pleas posted on leaflets all over the campus from people whose laptop got stolen at the end of their PhD, which left them with all data lost. You just don't want that to happen. Why you would want to carry around the only copies of all your work in one bag is another question. The group where I'm in luckily specifically forbids you to put your work outside the disks that are in the thorough automated backup mechanism: a snapshot for each of the four last mont

Why all the complaints about the price? This is about more than security, too... it's about power consumption and speed, too.

My thoughts?

Price:

$10/GB is not out of scale with current flash pricing, but nonetheless, the pricing will continue to fall. Initial release of "new" technologies like this inevitably start off pricey, usually dipping 50% after a year. I see this type of product falling even faster.

Advantages:

Forget security. The name of the game is power consumption. Hard drives (and DVD-ROM drives, too) suck a LOT of power on a laptop. Flash-based HDDs should offer a considerable improvement in battery life, and for many people, this is the "killer app" that will move this product from bleeding edge to consumer-level.

Nah, I don't think it'll be power. Honestly, where do you go in the modern world that doesn't have power? In fact, when I get a new laptop, the first thing that I do is get rid of the battery. They're heavy, hot, and they're rarely useful.

Flash memory has (depending on which technology) a limited life of 10^5 or 10^6 write operations. Now imagine your swap space being on flash.

Get used to the notion that this will mean you have to buy a new drive as these wear out now too. and older drives will start developing mysterious read errors, so will also need additional space-consuming data-redundancy for an error recovery strategy.

Flash memory has (depending on which technology) a limited life of 10^5 or 10^6 write operations...Get used to the notion that this will mean you have to buy a new drive as these wear out now too. and older drives will start developing mysterious read errors, so will also need additional space-consuming data-redundancy for an error recovery strategy.

The kind of flash controllers used for designs like these are built with wear levelling [wikipedia.org] approaches that manages this problem at a level below where the operating system will see errors. I wouldn't want to run a database server that's being written to all the time on one of them, but for normal notebook computer use 10^6 writes on every block should last several years.

Now imagine your swap space being on flash.

Why would you possibly do that? Add more (cheap!) physical RAM instead until there's no need to swap.

Even with gigs of RAM it's still useful to have some swap space. You won't use it all the time, but it's still handy to have.The obvious example is transient large memory use. I've got all my usual apps open. Now I want to play WoW on my lunch break. Rather than quitting everything I can just let the system swap out my apps when WoW loads and swap them back in when I quit. Maybe your laptop holds enough RAM that you don't care, but mine only holds 2 GB, and I can easily use more than that, particularly when

So don't use swap. It's pointless, especially in a system with a flash drive, where the mass storage isn't much cheaper than the RAM. Here's my laptop memory right now, with about 20 applications running on XP under VMWare, RAM-wasting Netbeans (java), 20 tabs open in Firefox, etc:

Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?

Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?

A mixture of:

Because the limit is actually fairly high.

Because wear leveling over such a large number of bits makes the problem less serious.

Because in practice many people don't actually write that much to a disk.

Because if you buy one of these things you accept that as part of the tr

You're assuming that all sectors will fail after the same number of write (2,000,000). So in your model, the drive entirely works, and then at a certain point the sector writes start failing one after another until the drive is toast.

Suppose each sector has some number of writes after which it will fail, and yo

With these new disks would be a great time for manufactures to align their specs with the consumers mind. i.e. 1,000,000,000 bytes does not equal a GB. For once I would like to buy a drive and actually be able to use 34,359,738,368 bytes and not the crummy 32,000,000,000 they are selling.

"The NAND flash contained in the SanDisk drive, in fact, only contains one bit of data per memory cell. SanDisk makes NAND flash that can hold two bits of data per cell and, through Msystems, has technology for expanding that to 4 bits of memory in a cell. Increasing the capacity can thus be accomplished without massive technological breakthroughs."

I remember being very thankful that thumb drives caught on. Over the years, I have been asked to recover data off of CDs that were cracked and 3.5" disks that had been put though heck. 3.5" disks were the worst. People would bring them in full of sand or with seriously damaged outer shells. With flash drives, I have seen them crushed, run through a washing machine, and partially melted by fire - but was able to recover the data most of the time. They are a huge improvement over the old storage media.No

I have read this as well, and was my first reaction when I read this. I heard this is a particular problem with FAT file systems, since every file write requires a master record update, which causes that place on the flash to "wear out".

Flash also can retrieve data faster. In its own tests, SanDisk says its flash drive can boot up Windows Vista -- the next version of the Windows operating system -- in 35 seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.

The AC didn't ask what specific numbers were or the methodology involved, he asked "Any mention of performance". So, um, yeah, I _did_ read TFA, and the post I answered as well. And, far as that goes, yeah they missed 2 seconds somewhere, but it's a reasonable benchmark, one that the likely audience can relate to. I mean, _I_ won't be booting Vista any time soon if ever, but it does tell me about overall performace with a large collection of random files.

The metric system was devised in the 18th century with the prefixes kilo, mega and giga. Just because some lazy asshat decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 when talking about computer memory doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. Hard disks have been using K = 1000 since before processors standardized on binary arithmetic.

I have a 4GB CF and it easily stores my Linux kernel, libraries, apps, and config files. I've heard Windows has issues with running on flash media mostly because there is no easy way to tell it the media should be read-only meaning that it quickly wears the media out with frivilous disk writing. I'd suspect you could fix this just be getting a CF to IDE adapter that supports making the drive read-only in hardware. Or you could just ignore it and buy new flash media every now and then.The CF to IDE adapters

Probably the only thing besides swap and logs would be if a file is recording access times on frequently used files. I do a lot of data processing (copying files, rewriting files, etc at about 100,000 files a day) which is also pretty intensive on disk writes so I don't do that on flash either.I've been considering getting a RAM drive for use of temp files and such but I haven't yet seen any quite big enough. I use a RAM disk anyway for/tmp but I'd like to have something a little more static, and with more